United States building codes have been very successful in protecting life safety during earthquakes, but they do not aim to protect against damage and high repair costs. Despite societal concerns over economic disruption after a future earthquake, a building's susceptibility to damage is almost never analyzed during the structural design process. This leaves us with a building stock that is vulnerable to damage, monetary loss, and possible closure after an earthquake. This I-Corps team's research activities and long-term vision focus on enabling engineers to consider damage/loss reduction in the building design process.
The team's plan is to create a commercial software tool that enables engineers to predict seismic damage and loss as part of the design process. This design approach will be new to many engineers, so the tool will be created to also provide Probable Maximum Loss (PML) analyses results (which engineers are accustomed to doing for the mortgage industry). If successful, this new design approach and the enabling software tool could revolutionize the way that buildings are designed in seismic areas. Specifically, this software tool (and the theory implemented in the tool) will give engineers a clearer understanding of the extent to which buildings will be damaged in earthquakes and provide an estimate of the cost to repair the buildings; this will enable engineers to design buildings in such a way as to reduce the seismic damage and repair costs, instead of using the current approach of only designing buildings to protect the life safety of building occupants.
This project facilitated an intensive study by the PI’s to evaluate the product-market fit for tools providing performance-based earthquake engineering assessments for buildings potentially subject to earthquake damage. The Team performed intensive customer discovery during summer 2014, interviewing 110 potential customers. The team discovered that there was a strong need for this technology among engineers designing new buildings on in the western United States where there is substantial risk of earthquake damage. While our analysis technology was of interest to these customers, a key missing value proposition was an interface that minimized the data entry required of engineers, and enabled performance predictions during the schematic design phase (when a detailed building design has not yet been developed). As a result of the summer customer discovery, the team made a "Go" decision and launched the Haselton Baker Risk Group (www.hbrisk.com) to develop a software licensing business model. By the end of the I-Corps project funding, the company had completed initial sales of the MVP software to several early adopter groups, had established key partnerships with two agencies that will have a large influence on potential user demand (the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Resiliency Council), and had submitted an SBIR Phase I proposal. The I-Corps funds were used to pay for expenses to participate in the I-Corps training, for travel to visit customers throughout the United States (including Alaska), and for computing time and software consultants associated with the cloud implementation of the software. Screenshots of the MVP software version have been uploaded along with this text.
